"We
are not ruled by murderers, but only -- by their friends," Rudyard Kipling
wrote a century ago. That the poet's stinging aphorism has become
hopelessly outdated is made clear by a New York Times article detailing
the assassination program being run out of the Obama White House.

The lengthy May 29 article in the Times establishes that personally
plotting killings and selecting victims occupies a great deal of
President Barack Obama's time. The process has been organized as a
weekly routine, with Obama heading so-called "Terror Tuesday" meetings
of military and intelligence officials. Each week they assemble in the
White House situation room to study mug shots and biographies of those
on the "kill list," some of them minors and, in one case, "a girl who
looked even younger than her 17 years."

In the end, Obama selects most of the victims. He "signs off on every
strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky
strikes in Pakistan -- about a third of the total," according to the Times.

Thus, when one sees or hears news accounts of "suspected militants"
being slain in a drone missile strike -- or the less frequent follow-up
stories revealing that the "militants" were in fact unarmed men, women
and children -- it can be assumed that Obama personally ordered the
killings.

The article is not an expose'. It appears to have been commissioned by
the administration itself as part of his re-election campaign's attempt
to run Obama as the unflinching commander-in-chief in the "war on
terror," touting the supposed success of his assassination program and
outflanking the Republicans from the right.

The authors note that the article is based upon interviews with "three
dozen of his [Obama's] current and former advisers," who were clearly
authorized and encouraged to talk about the president's immersion in
state murders.

Nonetheless, the portrayal of Obama and the state assassination
apparatus he heads is chilling. The article testifies to the degenerate
state of American "democracy" and the utter political demoralization of
its ruling strata. Even though in its tone it imbibes much of political
cynicism of the administration, its exposure of state criminality will
ultimately have far-reaching implications.

Among the specific episodes cited by the Times, is the first strike
ordered by Obama in Yemen on December 17, 2009. A cruise missile struck a
remote village killing dozens, including 14 women and 21 children,
fueling hatred for the US that continues to this day. The Times refers
to this remote-control massacre as a "sloppy strike."

Another is what the Times describes as the "problematic" case of
Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who was targeted
in August 2009 because "Pakistan wanted him dead" and the US relied on
Pakistani government complicity to carry out its drone strikes. Mehsud
represented no "imminent threat to the United States," the supposed
criteria for choosing victims from the "kill list." The administration
fudged this criterion by pretending that he posed a threat to US
personnel in Pakistan. In reality, the great majority of those targeted
are selected for assassination for the "crime" of resisting US
occupation of or intervention in their homeland.

The other problematic aspect of the target was that Mehsud was with his
family when the strike was ordered. Obama brushed aside concerns over
killing innocents, telling the CIA to "take the shot," confident that he
would face no protest from Pakistani officials. Killed in the attack
were Mehsud, his wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, an uncle and eight
others.

Obama deals with civilian casualties by refusing to count them. "Mr.
Obama," the Times reports, "embraced a disputed method for counting
civilian casualties that did little to box him in." It simply defined
any military age male killed in a strike zone as a combatant unless
there existed explicit evidence to the contrary.

The Times describes Obama as "a realist who, unlike some of his fervent
supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was
already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of
maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit."

This leads to what the Times refers to as "the ultimate test" of Obama's
"principles," the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born Muslim
preacher and US citizen who was targeted and killed in a drone strike in
Yemen last September.

The proposal to assassinate Awlaki posed Obama with an "urgent
question," the Times states. "Could he order the targeted killing of an
American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at
war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?"

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel provided the President
with a memo justifying such an attack on the grounds that, as the Times
reports, "...while the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process applied,
it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive
branch." Envisioned in this ruling is Obama's "kill list" committee as a
fourth branch of the US government. It is entirely consistent with the
"Fuhrer principle" of Nazi Germany, in which the leader's decisions
constituted supreme law.

Obama's response? "This one is easy," the former constitutional law
professor is quoted as saying, while aides told the Times he evinced no
qualms about killing the cleric.

There is clearly an element of personal psychology in Obama's evolution.
If he personally directs state killings, it is in part because he
enjoys it. The Times reports: "Asked what surprised him most about Mr.
Obama, Mr. [Thomas] Donilon, the national security adviser, answered
immediately: 'He's a president who is quite comfortable with the use of
force on behalf of the United States.'"

The secret of Obama's "principles" is that he has none. A political
chameleon without independent ideas, democratic convictions or moral
scruples, Obama's personality is that of a bureaucratic state
functionary. He identifies himself with the military and intelligence
apparatus that he officially "commands," always under the watchful eye
of his counterterrorism advisor, the former CIA official John Brennan.

More important than what the state killing program says about Obama
personally, however, is what it exposes about the ruling political
establishment as a whole. It testifies to the wholesale repudiation of
core constitutional principles at the highest levels and a real
political and moral breakdown of the entire US government.

If the assassination of an American citizen is "easy," of what crimes
are this president and his administration not capable? Clearly, the
institutionalization of kill lists, targeting committees and fascistic
justifications for state murder have profound implications at home as
well as abroad.

The swinish Democratic Party liberals together with their supporters
among the myriad pseudo-left "protest" organizations will, perhaps with a
bit of handwringing, still back the re-election of this president based
on the politically fraudulent and intellectually debased argument that
Obama represents the "lesser evil." There is nothing surprising about
this. They will go along with anything.

But there are countless millions of people in the United States who are
sickened by the news that the man who occupies the White House is
personally involved in the selection of victims for an unconstitutional
and utterly criminal program of extra-judicial killings. It will not be
long before this opposition -- deeply rooted in democratic traditions that
are still venerated by the American working class -- emerges into the open.

Bill Van Auken (born 1950) is a politician and activist for the Socialist Equality Party and was a presidential candidate in the U.S. election of 2004, announcing his candidacy on January 27, 2004. His running mate was Jim Lawrence. He came in 15th (more...)